Optimize Your Content for Google’s Rich Answer Box

You may have noticed that when searching for a term or asking a question on Google, you receive not only a list of search results, but also an informational box at the top of the page that displays a quick answer to your question or a description of your search term. This featured snippet is part of Google’s Rich Answer Box, which has been around a while, but is now becoming more prominent for quick answers, event listings, recipes, maps, and more. The demand for fast, relevant content has rocketed due to an increase in mobile usage – a study by Microsoft found that the human attention span has decreased from 12 second to eight seconds in the last 13 years. In order to give users a quick and accurate answer to their search query, Google now provides a short snippet of relevant content that a user can quickly read without having to scroll through a lengthy article. Here are a couple of examples where you can see that the content Google has chosen to show in its Answer Box is not always the top-ranking content in the search results: Here, you can see Hubspot’s content has been featured in the Answer Box over Adobe’s, even though Adobe’s content currently ranks in position one. In this example you can see that the description of “evergreen content” actually comes from Wordstream, which only ranks in fifth place for the term. So how does Google decide which content to display in its…